The International Book Fair (FIL) of Guadalajara (Mexico) will celebrate from November 29 to December 7 the 39th edition of its history with Barcelona as “a guest of honor that is luxurious,” the director of the event, Marisol Schulz, told EFE this Thursday.
The literary celebration will have Catalan “with all its presence and cultural representations” because “Catalan literature is very rich from medieval texts,” explained Schulz.
“Barcelona brings us a great delegation that represents what the city is today, with the Barcelona vanguard of multiculturalism that lives in several languages, not just Catalan and Spanish,” he explained.
Among the events that will take place will be a special tribute to Sant Jordi, with a team that will have more than 60 writers, shows, exhibitions and Catalan-Mexican fusion cuisine, in addition to the participation of the recent Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, Eduardo Mendoza.
An increasingly international fair
The city of Guadalajara, Jalisco (western Mexico), will host “with its hospitality, the quality of the people and the climate” an increasingly international fair due to the closeness that the American public has with the event.
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The North American country is the second nation in the world with the largest number of Spanish speakers (52.6 million), which represents a cultural center for literature in Spanish.
“There is a population for which Spanish is part of daily life, despite what this new president (Donald Trump) wants, for whom he would completely eradicate Spanish. But that cannot be done,” he stated.
“The presence of the Spanish book market in the United States is very important for generations of migrants who have the language as a second language. It is the speech of their parents and they want it to be rescued,” said Schulz.
A new scenario for the sector and the reader
In a context in which “the reader goes to the networks and the virtual (…) and consumption occurs through influencers, instead of turning our backs on them, we must attract them and try to work with those who talk, mainly, about literature,” explained the editor.
Regarding young people, he thinks that “they read a lot,” but “topics that interest them” so “you have to give them what they ask for.”
“The issue of reading is so fundamental that it is necessary to have critical capacity, to be able to understand a manual, a novel or a recipe. If people do not read, they will not interpret the instructions of their daily lives,” he stated.
“This critical capacity that we have as human beings is given to us by reading and I think it can be lost due to artificial intelligence,” criticized Schulz.
A technology that does not threaten the sector “if people are intelligent” because “Chat GPT lacks human emotion,” he acknowledged.
“All great technologies are tools, but they cannot replace human thought or emotions. What Chat GPT does not have is emotion,” he concluded.
The FIL is the main literary event in Spanish that brings together thousands of authors, publishers, professionals and the general public in the Mexican city of Guadalajara (Mexico). In 2020 she received the Princess of Asturias Award in the Communication and Humanities category.
With information from EFE
